Assets & Liabilities

No, I’m not going to talk about accounting. I’m going to talk politics, and then a little of corporate America.

On the topic of Bill Clinton, about whom I ranted yesterday, it occurs to me that in his wife’s political career, he has been both her greatest asset, and her greatest liability. It is a most curious conundrum to me.

(The latest Bill-Hill flap, in case you haven’t heard, was an interview with the Secretary of State during her marathon tour of Africa, in which someone made the error of asking her what her husband thought about some issue in the particular country she happened to be in at the time. Of course, Bill upstaged her when he brought the two American journalists home from Korea – something that realistically any prominent American political figure could have pulled off, save perhaps George Bush, for whom foreign policy was his Achilles’ heel. But Kim Jong-Il just wanted to posture the importance of his little country, and have someone high on the global radar come get the ladies back. John McCain could have pulled it off as easily as Bill. Anyway, when she was asked the question, she snapped, “My husband is not the Secretary of State!” setting off a media frenzy that focused on the retort, not all the goodwill generated during the entire trip.)

So anyway, as I was thinking about the incident, I was reminded of the numerous gaffes he made during her campaign, and how he frequently upstaged her. We all knew he’d be a disaster as a “First Dude,” for that very reason. And his mess-ups on the campaign trail – plus concerns over whether he’d try to run the show if she were President – may well have cost her the election, along with bad campaign strategy and raising less money than her rival.

Yet, at the same time, who would Hillary Clinton be without Bill? On her own, she is smart and conniving, two things any successful politician must be. Yet, would she have attained the same status on the national stage had she not been the former First Lady? Would this Illinois native have been elected to a Senate seat from New York? I think not.

Heck, her stoic, Tammy Wynette-esque response to his affair with Monica Lewinsky may have made the tryst the best thing that ever happened to her, politically; after all, she’d been handed the all-important task of architecting a health care plan, and she bombed.

Again, I do think she’s very intelligent, and shrewd, and capable of hard work and good decisions, even if I disagree with her politics. But the presidency is a popularity contest, and I just don’t think she’d have attained the national stage without Bill’s popularity. Yet at the same time, she couldn’t take the final step on the stage’s podium, perhaps because of him. Interesting.

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On to the current President. In a speech defending his health care agenda, two things bothered me. The first? He stammered an awful lot. You know, like people tend to do when they’re trying to make something up, or defend something that’s indefensible. And either of those possibilities gives me about a trillion reasons to be concerned about this bill.

The second is that he invoked his Grandmother, who died the day before he was elected to the highest office in the land. Addressing concerns voiced by some opponents that end-of-life counseling would mean taking health care away from the elderly and “killing Grandma” – a notion, by the way, upon which placing the focus does little good for the opposition in my opinion – the President dismissed those concerns as ridiculous, citing his love for his own Grandmother, who raised him, as evidence that he’d never adopt a plan that would harm someone’s dear granny.

Yeah, we’re talking about the same Grandmother to whom he referred as a “typical white woman” in discussing her racial stereotyping, which was probably the most ironic statement ever uttered. The same Grandmother he threw under the bus during the campaign by saying he could no more disown the radical, America-damning (by God, no less) Rev. Jeremiah Wright than he could his own Grandmother.

The same Grandmother whom he visited late in the campaign – and late in her life – when her health was failing. But that wasn’t important enough to bring the entire family, to let his daughters say their good-byes to great-Grandma.

Now, taking them to Ghana to learn about their African heritage, that was important (though they didn’t visit their other Grandma in Africa while they were there, either – and see my July 11 entry for more on that trip). And taking them to Hawaii after the election for an extended stay and some critical beach time – yeah, that was vital. And taking them to Montana the other day while he hawked health care reform – well, I’ll bet the girls had never been to Montana, and it is an awfully pretty state.

I just have a real problem with the way this guy uses family members to further a political point, but doesn’t match the rhetoric with action in the way he treats them. Like the way he invoked his African Grandmother frequently during the campaign, and in his book, but only stopped to visit her briefly on a trip to Africa during the campaign – just long enough for a photo op – then told her he had to scoot on to the next stop. Yet he had plenty of time for crowds in Germany and other countries as he courted the world.

It’s reminiscent of Greg Stillson, the presidential candidate in Stephen King’s novel, “The Dead Zone,” when he grabbed a young child and held him in front of him to shield his own body when the book’s protagonist opens fire on him in an assassination attempt – except in this case, Obama’s grabbing his own family members.

To me, it says that the most important thing to him is his political career. And I’d prefer my President believe that the most important thing is America, and its people.

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Finally, as I was thinking about yesterday’s post, on the topic of Bill Clinton’s “political imperative” quote, it occurred to me that that’s what politicians are primarily concerned about: not the long-term health of America (and I mean health in the broad sense), but in the next election cycle.

And that made me think about what’s wrong with the stock market these days. The focus is no longer on the long-term success of a company, but on next quarter’s earnings. Do you understand why?

The textbook, B-school answer to “What is the responsibility of management?” is, “To maximize shareholder wealth.” But the nature of shareholders has changed.

We no longer view stocks as a long-term investment. We day-trade. We change our 401k allocations frequently. We look at our statement every month, and panic if the balance goes down. Why? Because we’ve been encouraged by Wall Street to do so, through its instrument of market destruction, Bubblevision (aka CNBC, if you haven’t been reading this blog for a while). Brokers profit on every trade, so if they can get you to trade more, they make more money.

So, back to politicians’ focus on the near-term – namely, the next election cycle. Have we, the people, been somehow duped into changing the nature of our constituentship, such that we expect, and even encourage, the short-term focus? Or is Washington just that corrupt and self-serving on its own, that the power-mad in Congress are singularly committed to keeping themselves ensconced in the seat of power? I wonder.

Is it them, or is it us? Either way, it has to change, it must change, or we as a nation are headed down the same perilous path of volatility and corruption as corporate America has traveled over the last decade or so.

And unlike the corporate America example, every one of us is paying for it.